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A Religious Quilt That Is Largely Patchwork

One of the great themes in recent American religious history involves the passing of Protestantism as the dominant cultural force, and the transformation of the nation's religious landscape into something much more complex.

Largely because of changes in immigration laws in the 1960's, the United States ''is now the most religiously diverse country on earth,'' wrote Diana L. Eck, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard Divinity School, in the September-October issue of Harvard magazine. The magazine's cover featured a mosque, while Professor Eck described how large Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu communities have emerged in many places as near neighbors of Christians and Jews.

But given this change in the culture, what does it mean now to study religion as an academic subject?

Is the field of religious studies about theology, how believers understand the divine? Or is it more anthropological, the study of regional histories and cultures in which different faiths developed? Or is it social science, heavy on statistics and the charting of trends?

In the view of Barbara DeConcini, executive director of the American Academy of Religion, a professional association of 8,000 scholars, it is all these things. Religion, Dr. DeConcini said, is a broad field, not a single academic discipline or methodology.

That becomes readily apparent from even a quick glance at the program guide to the academy's annual meeting, which begins today in New Orleans, and features panels of scholars who will discuss the world's religions from the standpoints of sociology, psychology, popular culture, ethnicity and much else.

In such diversity, it is not surprising that a certain tension exists. The November issue of the academic magazine Lingua Franca raises questions about how religion is taught at the university level, while focusing on a group of scholars who would push the field in a purely scientific direction, in which neither teachers nor students make reference to personal beliefs or to the idea that life might contain a sacred dimension. These scholars have formed their own organization, the North American Association for the Study of Religion, which, the magazine reports, has about 50 members.

But it is the increasing tendency toward specialization within religious studies departments, a trend also noted in the Lingua Franca article, that troubles other scholars.

Asked whether he discerned a central theme in most religious studies programs, James B. Wiggins, chairman of the department of religion at Syracuse University, replied, ''I don't know what it would be.''

Many college-level religious studies programs are small, Professor Wiggins said, and might well include a New Testament scholar, a specialist in Tibetan Buddhism, an authority on Asian faiths, an expert on Islam, and a professor whose field is Native American religions.

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''That spectrum is so diverse, and the kind of training they might have gone through so demanding, as in the acquisition of languages,'' he said, ''they might quite literally have nothing to talk about.''

Professor Wiggins, who served as the academy's executive director from 1983 to 1991, suggested that religious studies faculties would benefit from trying to answer a central question: what is religion?

But not everyone favors this idea. Dr. DeConcini, for one, objected that trying to forge a definition of religion would threaten to exclude teachers whose specialities run outside conventional bounds -- like, she said, an authority on Asian ritual dances.

There are more of those specialists around, she said, as fewer people seeking academic jobs in religious studies are likely to hold degrees in Christian theology. In turn, that means that fewer religious studies departments are likely to use Judaism or Christianity to define just what it means to be religious.

Yet amidst this pluralism, it is still possible to try a rough definition of religion. Martin Marty, the historian of Christianity at the University of Chicago, said he identified ''six marks,'' which taken together define a system of beliefs and practices as being religious.

That system must center on a matter of deep meaning, or ''ultimate concern,'' he said, and also involve socialization (believers tend to form communities), show a preference for symbolic language over everyday speech, use ceremonies (especially at birth, marriage and death), take a metaphysical view of life (there is more to the world than what one sees) and require behavioral adjustments (attending Sunday School or shunning pork).

In an article that is to appear in the magazine Academe, Professor Marty noted that St. Augustine once said he thought he knew what time was until someone asked him to define it. As a subject of study, religion, Professor Marty writes, is similarly protean, and therefore demands many specialists.